Meaning of ART-Its definition, and some comments Arrived at from trying to answer questions.
Among the generation of intellectual Marxists of the generation which came of age between 1880 and 1900, art was their substitute for religion. Most of them were either atheists or agnostics and therefore could not attend services, nor take comfort in religious reading. Art, though, could give them inspiration without allegiance to any religion. On the other hand, leaving religion behind did not improve their lot as sinners in this world. They kept a very high ethical code derived from their religions [either Christian or Jewish] and had to try to help everyone, but especially the poor and downtrodden, to gain economic emancipation and education. So, the Good Works issue was still with them. The question, of course, is, how could art give them inspiration? We have several ways to better the economic and social lives of others, but in their context what did art do, and did it also do that elsewhere?
Until the 20th century art has always been referential in both the West and the East. The Chinese thought of landscape painting in black and white as the most philosophical kind of painting. They felt it could express, not only a world view, but ways and means of behavior which would not only allow the soul to get free of mundane considerations, but to engage in searching for truly spiritual ones.
In the West, Christian religious painting had always been conceived of by Catholics as a way stop on the way to heaven. The images of the saints were venerated as were some of the saints, and assuredly, the virgin. She not only interceded for the mortal man, but also was an exemplar of proper behavior. Perhaps an opposite pole to Job, who was after all, pre-Christian. But, what about paintings of the Greek and Roman Gods, classical landscape, often with figures as in Bellini-Titian’s Feast of the Gods? After a thousand five hundred years of Christianity, embodying virtues in God’s saints and their lives, European painters were pretty much aware of the symbolic and emblematic possibilities in painting a secular or a pagan figure, and in painting as landscape or a cityscape. It was not only the images which would be turned towards a Godly and ethical use, but the kinds of spaces made in the painting. The emphases, pictorially on the importance of painted actions and their actors.
So, when Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the thirteen-forties, paints a view which is supposed to be the Results of Good Government in his series, the results of Good and Bad Government, in the town hall of Siena, he shows a city in which children are going to school, the roofs are being repaired, and citizens are having an impromptu round dance in the streets. A couple, mounted on horses is going out the town gate into the landscape which surrounds the city. In the landscape farmers are working the fields, while others are hunting for birds, careful not to harm the growing crops. Now this landscape was painted so as to be visible in its most assured form from the table behind which the elected oligarchy which ruled Siena, sat. If we use that as the ideal spot and send out diagonals into space along the rectangular painting on the side of the wall, as it diverges from our location, those diagonals are the space making ones, not a spatial system within the painting, with vanishing points. So on a line parallel to the lower edge of the mural, the further away we get from the other end of the room, the further into space a figure would be. This perspectival system resembles some used by the Chinese, but nothing used in Europe. The space unfolds in a clear and orderly way, and the landscape pointedly resembles that, still surrounding Siena. There may be some changes in scale internal to the landscape’s development which don’t completely follow the perspectival rules which Lorenzetti sets up, but the Sienese had established a tradition of perspectival exceptions for subject matter reasons. These are found all over the back panels of Duccio’s Maesta. They intensify the action and its symbolic meaning. Those in the Lorenzetti are not so important, they merely intensify smaller local actions which might otherwise, get lost. By the way, in the city, the houses are presented on angles which let us look around them, no picture puncturing perspective corridors are created, and the movement of the eye over the city’s buildings is calm and rhythmic, rather than jerkily irregular.
Here is an example of the space in a major public commission as a major source of the painting’s fulfilling its commissioners requirements. The results of good government are an active, busy, city state, with happy, even dancing people; with citizens left enough spare time to trip into the country side. The city is being kept up, and the country is productive.
Originally the painting opposite it, on the outer wall of the chamber [unfortunately whose other side received the rain, wind, and climate changes of the earth], carried a painting showing the Results of Bad Government. Time has not been kind to it. It has largely been lost. But the original arrangement included a series of one point perspective corridors in the city which trapped the eye over and over in the middle distance. The roofs were in disrepair, a robber is shown with his bleeding victim on a street corner; so we know that bad government results in danger in the streets, failure to repair the city’s dwellings, and a pictorial structure which also expresses the failure of the government to have a meaningful and at least palliative effect on the city’s problems.
Ambrogio’s paintings were beautiful, they expressed emotion through storytelling and through pictorial structure. They were meant to so affect his fellow citizens that they were liable to make good decisions in running the town. The painting which was seen by those coming before the council with requests is the judgment of the dead. It is another lovely painting, and at the same time a warning to speak truthfully and seek what was not only best for you but best for your society.
The artist, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, was thought of, as an intellectual, in his own time. He was so well respected, that he was elected to the oligarchy himself at least once. His knowledge of classical poetry and its imagery was great. His work has, today, for non citizens of Siena, great power. The landscape in Good Government is full, idyllic, reminiscent of classical poetry about the landscape and the lives of farm workers. He was not only knowledgeable of the Christian traditions dealing with life and livelihood, but also pagan ones. They blended in a seamless whole when he wished to influence his viewers to behave well, and earn their proper homely results. Why would a treatise on proper civic government not have served as well? Because Ambrogio defines, through forming, the scene of the success of this policy. He presents it to us in all its sensual beauty. We look at it and are transfixed by its wonder, and his candor. The painting is not a mundane calculation, it is a supra-mundane miracle of art, which allows us to appreciate its state by experiencing the world about which it has been painted. For some moments, that world is real. The artist, through his magical constructive power has given us a world to experience which we enjoy, and are ennobled by having experienced. It is only art which can do that for most men. There are some who can get this from mathematics, or from philosophy, but all men can experience the painting and with its emotional depth at best it can galvanize our feelings into action, or at worst, it can give us a taste of one artist’s wonder and power, which is so much beyond descriptive prose that we believe, even if for only a minute, in his/her reality.
Returning to another point. I did say that we don't know enough about making good art beyond our own practice to write a treatise. That is different from saying we don't know enough about making good art altogether. While, of course I did continue that is true for myself, thinking about the issue made me realize something which I had not earlier caught. We do have a great 20th century treatise on art. It was not meant to be published, and it was originally meant for the use of its originator, only, but I have been recommending it for some twenty-five years or so. It is Paul Klee's The Thinking Eye. What is most wonderful about it is that it hones in on what Klee knew best. It does not teach his hand, his means of making his works, but his means of ideation; his method of creating metaphors, and then with examples of how he follows a sensibility ordered path to turn them into art. It is as much the great method of the twentieth century as Leonardo's is the great model of the sixteenth century. One of the major changes since Leonardo's time is that Klee has included all his scientific speculation in his invention of art. He does not wear two hats, his artist hat subsumes his scientist and mathematician hats.
This post was meant to recreate a post which I thought I had lost. It appears as a comment, thus there will be some duplication. There should be no contradictions.
Love,
Gabriel
